


Fire and Ice

by ultimatequesadilla



Series: Fire and Ice AU [1]
Category: Club Penguin
Genre: Club Penguin - Freeform, Gen, also take a tally of every time Ace is a Mary Sue by any standards, and i ain't letting that glorious writing marathon go to waste, and put under their pillow, and run in a different direction with them while screaming, bc i'll be honest this is gonna read like a lot more refined version, because i wrote like 13000 words of it in a manic 23 hr sitting, but now that i'm older my writing can be Darker and Worse! Fun!, of a fanfic an 11 year old would write in a single subject notebook, that and i wanted to take the violent implications of the setup to Operation Blackout, which i totally did at that age, why am i doing this you ask?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-02-22 12:52:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13167312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultimatequesadilla/pseuds/ultimatequesadilla
Summary: Ace denies the Elite Penguin Force for reasons explicit in its name. Having been there for the very beginnings of Herbert's plans, back when the PSA was a hodgepodge agency of penguins just trying to keep the island safe, she doesn't hold back her disdain for the EPF's heavy heirarchy and glitzy gadgets.So when the EPF fails to locate Gary upon his kidnapping, Ace takes matters into her own hands (er, flippers) and investigates the old PSA HQ for leads.It is there that she is caught up in Herbert's latest and greatest plan: a plan that nearly kills her. Undercover, demoralized and in denial, she finds a quiet job at the Club Penguin Times and settles in for the apocalypse. But her attempts to run away just drag her back to the organization she had disowned--and the penguins who she had once known, and who she must now lead to victory or to the end of the world.Whatever the cost.[Alternate timeline for Operation Blackout. I took the setup for the party and went off in entirely new and fun(TM) directions.]





	1. Not Here for Nostalgia

Ace hadn’t been back to the old HQ in years. Ever since the Popcorn incident, she’d liked to pretend the PSA hadn’t existed, because that was what you did, right? You moved up in the ranks of the EPF and let the past slide, even as you kept your hand on the blue phone in your pocket, waiting for the day you were called to another mission that didn’t involve connecting circuits or breaking into terminals.

Those were the days.

She hesitated before pressing the button, wondering where it’d take her. It was set to HQ, but had the HQ really been rebuilt like G had said….? A moment passed in petrified fear as Ace imagined her cells competing for space against molecules of rock and dirt and concrete. Then she pressed the teleport button, and felt the familiar jolt to her stomach, and she was there.

There. Screens flickered to life on the walls, some glitching in and out but all showing life on the island she held dear. She ran a flipper along the edge of the desk.

She wasn’t here for nostalgia, though. She was here on a mission of her own design. She opened a drawer and flipped through dozens of manila envelopes, marked in the code it took her a moment to remember. One, simply marked, “G”, caught her eye, and she took it from its folder and set it on the desk. If the EPF’s databases couldn’t hint at what Herbert was planning, then perhaps the PSA’s could.

More and more folders piled up. Another on Gary, everything they had on Herbert, countless different gadgets. When she’d found all she needed she took her thermos from her bag, set it on the desk and breathed in the smell of coffee. It was going to be a long night. A lonely night as well, she figured, though she didn’t much mind. She wasn’t one for talking; the rhythm of conversation escaped her, and by the time she could get a word in the subject would change and she’d be left quiet listening as if everything was a television. Now paper, words, these wouldn’t escape her, outrun her. She had all the time in the world.  
And she would need it, now with all the island’s secrets at her disposal, a mystery to solve and an agency who’d failed to solve it. It wasn’t that they didn’t know who had taken Gary. Penguins had seen it, the polar bear who snatched him up and ran before anyone could react. It was undoubtedly Herbert. Now the only question was where?

Ace sat in the red patched-up chair and remembered how much fun she’d had spinning it around. Not here for nostalgia, she told herself, here on a mission. Here. On a mission. She repeated it silently, moving her beak to the imagined words. “On a mission.”  
And then the only warning was a whirring sound, something that she attributed to the ventilation in the few moments she’d had to think. Then everything vanished into white, for an instant, and the light was accompanied by a symphony of roaring and cracking and,

Her back hit the wall; she could hear nothing but a deafening ringing. The HQ was ablaze, fire sparking and twisting, air shimmering with the heat. She could see the sky, blue piercing through the corner where the ceiling would hit the wall of screens, which lay scattered over the ground and the desk which had fragmented and gone careening into the wall almost above her head.  
She tried to move, but all she could do was yell as pain tore across her entire side. She took a few deep, aching breaths before even daring to look. A shard of the desk, twisted and nearly glowing with heat, was lodged through her jacket. She tried to move again and something occurred to her and her yells became screams, at least in her mind. She wasn’t sure if she could make any sound at all, really. She was pinned. All the way through, the shard had pinned her to the concrete. If the wound didn’t kill her first, she would burn with the headquarters. Already the smoke made her eyes sting and each breath was a cough.

Think, Ace, think, think, think,

The teleport button. Her spy phone was in her pocket. She just had to….

She held her breath as she twisted to find her pocket. The desk shard had been inches from destroying her PSA phone; her EPF tablet had been entirely shattered, and glass poked her flipper.  
She had her flipper on the PSA phone. She didn’t care where she turned it, as long as it wasn’t here. The wheel clicked, and the button pressed, and she didn’t even look as she was whisked away.

 

Teleportation was always uncomfortable. Yet now it was hell of the worst kind as her body had no idea what to do with the fact that it was falling apart. The moments which she knew were infinitely short stretched on for eternity, her vision filled not with darkness but with a strange absence of light, consciousness trapped in a limbo broken only by fear.  
And she was at the Beach. Snow hissed as it was struck by droplets that shimmered jet-black in the dim light—wasn’t it daytime—and Ace’s vision wavered. She felt nothing anymore, as she stared at her feet and the darkening snow around them.

Footsteps. Footsteps in the snow, approaching her.

    “Hello?” An unfamiliar voice laced with worry, confusion—understandable—and Ace cursed herself for landing in a place so populated. If she were found out….if someone were insane enough to turn her in….

She glanced up at the voice’s source: a blue penguin cast in gray by the overcast, in cobbled-together scrubs, first aid kit held tightly as they sprinted toward her. This penguin began to speak again; the words muddled together, nigh incomprehensible, and tunnel vision crept narrower and narrower, and

 

Ace fell.

 

 

Ace awoke without any knowledge of where she was or when it was, for the sky outside was a dull gray and the room was entirely unfamiliar. The walls were stark, sterile white, and one of the first details she could notice was the harsh smell of antiseptic. It burnt and she coughed, and her throat hurt and with it came the rest of her. Gone was the terrible clenching pain, replaced by only a dull background ache, but still it lay like a monster in her every bone, and trying to move made it rear its ugly head.  
  
She groaned and tried to sit anyway. She managed to raise her head enough to survey the room. It took her a long while to notice that it was the Lighthouse, repurposed beyond recognition to house the sick and injured. A massive poster on the far wall plead for doctors to join the cause, and medical equipment had been dragged from who-knows-where to replace the stage’s usual music with a symphony of moans and coughs and labored breathing and dozens of various beeps and trills. Doctors rushed in and out, many in civilians’ clothing, all wearing their unheard-of urgency like a brand on their haggard faces.

A familiar face among them, though the color she’d mistaken for blue in the light was truly a deep purple. Her rescuer’s face lit up when they saw her, and they nearly pushed another doctor out of the way as they half-jogged to her bedside.

                “You’re awake! We were afraid for a bit—do you need anything?”

Immediately Ace noticed a few things about this penguin. Their voice was as quick as their thoughts, definitely, and it skipped from sentence to sentence almost without pausing to finish them, though it may have just been relief at her stability. Their fidgeting betrayed their anxiety, the deep shadows under their eyes revealed who knows how many days without sleep.  
They were badly suited to the role of medic, in a crisis such as this, if they were so moved by every stranger who waddled to the Lighthouse doorstep.

Or, in Ace’s case, teleported in plain sight of this complete stranger.

                “I don’t….” Ace winced, “Who are you?”

                “Chrissy,” the medic said without hesitation, a massive grin plastered on her face. She held out a flipper in greeting and then took it back when Ace didn’t lift hers in response. Her smile fell away and revealed her weariness. She pulled a stool up to the bedside and sat on it. “And you?”

                “Lilly,” Ace said with equal sincerity, though rather than being a few fish short of a barrel she was just very, very experienced in lying. “Where are we? Do I—“

She finally looked down at herself, saw her torso covered in bandages and an IV stuck in her wrist, and something nagged at the back of her mind. Something was wrong, besides the obvious, there was something—

_Her jacket._

                “Chrissy, where’s my jacket?” Ace whispered, almost a hiss. Chrissy raised her flippers in the air, half-offended.

                “It was too far gone to keep, we threw it out.” She quieted her voice for a second. “I cleared the pockets before we did, though. Your belongings are safe with me.”

Safe. Safe was relative, and her safety just got a lot more rocky. It wasn’t that Chrissy was a threat, though if Ace could lie through her teeth so could any penguin. It wasn’t Chrissy, but who she could  _tell._ If HQ was any indication, agent status was now a brand. No wanted posters needed, for each agent was their own bounty, and someone finding her EPF tablet or god forbid her PSA phone…

Chrissy had found both. And Ace could hardly move, much less defend herself when a cavalry of crabs inevitably busted down that door. Perhaps the bear himself would come to greet her! She knew how he hated her. She, who had been there from the beginning, who had foiled all his plans and who now would take only a nudge to finish off once and for all. Wouldn’t he revel in it? Parade her through the streets as a standard for the fate of others?

                “You’re afraid,” Chrissy muttered softly, so beneath the cacophony of hospital sounds only the two of them could hear her. “Don’t be.” And for a second her voice held a semblance of sincerity. Ace was almost inclined to trust her.

But all she could do for now was lay her head back and close her eyes. She was so, so, so tired.


	2. Succession

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short-ish chapter this time around. Conversely, I re-outlined and the whole fic just got much longer.

She’d been at the Penguin Times for a week. Well, she should call it the  _Herbert_ Times or risk punishment, but the bear couldn’t see into her thoughts, now could he?  _Could_ he? That was a thought she’d rather not entertain. Ace brought the steaming-hot coffee to her beak, held it in her flippers to get as much warmth as possible from the ceramic.

                “Ah, Lilly!” came the gentle voice of Aunt Arctic from the other room. Why Herbert had let her keep her job when the entire paper had to be run by him anyway was a mystery. “Would you come here a moment?”

Ace nodded. “Yes ‘m.” She took a swig of her coffee and set it on her coaster—all the coasters in the office had a little print of a sun on it, just one example of the clever spite that she so admired in her boss. She sucked in a breath as she stood and her old wound still hurt. Fully healed or no, she’d refused to remain in the Lighthouse for longer than absolutely necessary. Chrissy had given her phone back, and the pieces of her tablet in a plastic bag which was a nice if ineffective touch, and she’d been sorely tempted to teleport rather than walk in the freezing cold. She couldn’t risk detection though, so walk it was. It’d taken an entire night to make her way to the Town.  
And once she’d made it there, she’d never left.

                “You needed something?” She stood at the door to Aunt Arctic’s office, and her boss smiled.

“Yes, yes, I needed your input on this month’s main story.” Aunt Artic pushed her glasses further up her beak. They made her eyes look larger, wiser, fitting. “I’ll make us some tea, too, I’ve never been a fan of coffee.” The way she spat the last word, with such facetious vitriol, brought a small smile to Ace’s face.

“Does tea even grow on the island anymore? It's been a whole two months.”

Aunt Arctic laughed and shook her head.

                “No, but I have enough in here for at least a year if I pretend I don’t care how the flavor’s kept up. Now, earl gray or jasmine?” She waddled over to a cabinet and began rifling through a bin; the smell of an almost-unreasonable amount of tea in all different varieties wafted through the room, giving it a springtime feel that contrasted the oppressive winter of outside. The coffee shop’s attic had a perfect view of Herbert’s newly-built mansion, his rooftop and atop it the laser that shone into the sky and turned the life-giving light into naught but destruction. Destruction which Ace refused to worry herself over, lest the weight of her own helplessness grow even heavier.  

                “Jasmine, please,” Ace requested. Aunt Arctic took out a bag of loose-leaf and two tea strainers, each with a little pewter bee at the end of its chain. Two mugs, both sky-blue in color, which alongside the bees and the coasters brought a bit of sunshine to the space and worked wonders to lift Ace’s spirits.

She sat with her mug and waited for her tea to begin steeping while Aunt Arctic puttered about her cabinets for a bit longer before settling into her desk chair again. She turned the laptop toward Ace.

                “What do you think?”

It was a thinkpiece. An actual tabloid thinkpiece, straight from the pen of Aunt Arctic herself, so unlike anything she’d ever written before. The headline? Ace read it aloud.

                 _“Penguins’ Partying and its Effects on Rest: Are Penguins Ruining Proper Sleep Cycles?”_ She couldn’t help a chuckle. “It’s amazing already. It’ll fit perfectly.”

Aunt Arctic laughed as well, though her practiced joviality only reached as far as her eyes, and sipped her tea. She’d chosen the earl gray.

                “Let’s hope so,” she said. “The bear gets more strict by the month. Have you read the entire article?”

Ace scanned through the mindless drivel, but her eyes lingered on the bottom. Typed out carefully, in a tiny font using nothing but punctuation which she found impressive, was Code.

_We’ve been compromised. You’ll be promoted tomorrow._

“Can I make a few edits?” Ace tried to disguise the panic in her voice. She frantically typed, in plain text after deciding the code would be too slow.

                     _What do you mean? Compromised?_

Aunt Arctic shot her a knowing glance as she turned the laptop back toward herself and tapped her own message out on it.

                     _There are secrets you cannot know still, Ace, but tomorrow I will be gone and you will be given position as sole writer and editor. It’s all according to plan, you just have to trust me._

Ace did a double take and frowned deeply. She typed her next words very slowly and glared up at Aunt Arctic as she slid the laptop over with quiet deliberation.

                     _How do you know my name?_

Aunt Arctic took her glasses off to rub her eyes, and sighed heavily. She typed.

                     _I know your name, and I know your agent status._

_I’m not an agent._

_How so?_

_You can’t be an agent in an agency that doesn’t exist. You’ve seen the everyday phoning facility. There’s nothing left!_

Aunt Arctic read, and then paused to stare at her, and there was steely anger in her gaze that made Ace wither back with an apology on her tongue. She stopped herself from speaking, though, standing silently.                

                    _I’m starting to rethink my decision,_ Aunt Arctic typed. _Loyalty is as much a part of the Director’s duties as strength or skill._

Ace held her flippers over the keyboard at a loss for words. She shook her head and typed as quickly as possible, _Director? What do you mean, Director?_

She knew perfectly well what Aunt Arctic meant by Director, but to her, the word and all that it carried was disjointed from Aunt Arctic as a whole. Perhaps that was what had made her so brilliant, so undetectable—so unassuming, to be the center of the island’s premiere web of secrecy.  
Aunt Arctic took the laptop and typed for what seemed like a long, long time.

_We can’t talk more, Ace. Our editing is already drawing suspicion. You’re not my first choice for succession, but you’re the only choice right now, and if Herbert were to get ahold of me as Director….we both know how that would turn out._

_Do not just hide the role, Ace. Become it, and maybe we can succeed._

Aunt Arctic showed Ace the laptop screen, then deleted their conversation and the coded message and saved over the document. She shut the computer and with another sigh stood from her desk, stirring her tea.

                “It’s a shame,” she said, eyes fixed on the beverage, “We don’t have any honey left. Seems even the greenhouse is too cold for bees now.” A pause. “You can go, Lilly. I’ll take your edits into consideration.”

Ace nodded and stood, and without another word returned to her own office, leaving her own tea on the desk. The pewter bee on its little chain rocked back and forth like a pendulum. Anything she could say caught in her throat.

 

 

True to form, for Aunt Arctic never lied, the next day the attic was empty and clawmarks covered the windowsills. There was no sign of a struggle, but there were signs of crabs, dozens of them, in and out of the building as quickly and quietly as crabs could go. Ace realized, seeing both mugs of tea cold and untouched on the desk, that she’d never bothered to ask Aunt Arctic how she’d kept her secret this long—and how it’d been found out. What traitors had come into the coffee shop? And what true agents, not knowing that their Director sat in the editor’s chair?  
She’d been so distracted denying the EPF that she’d missed out on crucial information; she clenched her flippers and shouted, kicking a wastebasket over. Papers and other various and sundries spilled out: crumpled old issues of the Penguin Times, a few pieces of scratch paper, old teabags that had leached teastains over their surroundings. One paper caught Ace’s eye: an unfolded, unstained sticky note, which lingered in the air as it fell. Written, again, in code, scrawled with half-frozen ballpoint pen in a hurry:

 

                 _Be resourceful, be remarkable, be ready. The island needs you. They need you. Someone will meet you downstairs as soon as it is safe._

With that last sight of Aunt Arctic’s handwriting, still somehow elegant even in blocky code, Ace’s heart sank to the floor as the realization sank into her mind, the weight of a title bearing down on her and springing unbidden tears to her eyes which she could almost _feel_ freezing on her cheeks. Unhesitating, she tore the sticky note to tiny, tiny, shreds, and tossed it into the spilt rubbish.

The little bits of paper fluttered to the ground like feathers.

Ace sat, in the plush office chair usually reserved for head editor. Though, she figured, that was her now. Head editor, only editor, head Director, _only Director_. Her brain was running and every fibre of her soul wanted to lash out, to kick the desk over and shatter everything on it, for maybe then she could pick up the pieces and they’d make an answer to the puzzle. She’d thought she could leave the puzzle behind. The newspaper didn’t need any puzzles when it was reduced to nothing but Herbert propaganda. The  _island_ didn’t need any puzzles when the final piece had been its subjugation. She’d resigned herself to that version of reality. But this introduced so, so many more pieces, so many more places they could go and some which didn’t fit anywhere.

 

She was a piece to this puzzle. There was no picture to reference, no guide to tell her where she fit in anymore. If anything, she _was_ the guide—the instruction book, the back of the box.  
But what the instructions she was to give _were—_ and who she would be giving them _to--that_ escaped her still.

Some Director she would make.


	3. Did They Go Gently

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can someone tell me where they confirm PH's name is Paige? I saw it in the wiki, and went with it bc honestly PH is a lil' awkward in prose (...i'll be honest most of these names really are)

The next few days droned on. Ace used the password scrawled on yet another sticky note to get into the laptop, and submitted the Penguin Times files for Herbert’s consideration. She submitted with Aunt Arctic’s email, figuring Herbert would know it was her either way, not that he hopefully knew who ‘her’ was exactly. Now she figured she would just have to wait. She put her head in her flippers. She had no idea how this worked, she was walking a fine line, she hadn’t slept in a day and a half because every little creak in the wood could be a crab snipping its little way in to nab her in her sleep. She wondered briefly if she could fight back.

The ringing of the coffee shop doorbell made her heart jolt. Her mind ran through the options.  
A hapless customer, who she’d give a Styrofoam cup of coffee as hot as she could manage and send on their way.  
An emissary of Herbert, or the bear himself. She figured there was no point dwelling on  _that_ possibility, since if it came to pass there’d be no way  _out._

Or, the penguin Aunt Arctic had said would come to meet her.

                “Hello?” The voice was as shallow as Ace remembered from the few times she’d heard it. Chrissy. Which still left all three possibilities open.

Ace slowly made her way down the stairs, swallowing her fear. She smiled warmly to greet Chrissy, who had traded her hospital garb for a simple warm winter outfit and dark hair pulled back into a braid. Not the look Ace had been expecting, but not a bad look either.

                “It’s been a while,” Ace beamed. “Up for a cup of coffee?”

Chrissy shook her head.

                “I was told to be here at….” She looked down at her watch, bemused. “Ten AM? I think it’s ten.”

Ace shrugged concomitantly.

                “It doesn’t matter anymore, really.” She paused and drew her eyebrows in both thought and suspicion. “Who sent you?”

Chrissy grinned and clasped her flippers together.

                “Oh, Aunt Arctic! It was a joy to meet her, really, she’s the nicest, i’nt she? I  _adore_ her articles, I always complete the puzzles on the later pages,” as Chrissy rambled she flicked her eyes to the attic stairs. There was something about her voice, a slight nearly-imperceptible change of accent, which inclined Ace to trust her. She couldn’t put her flipper on _what,_ and after that fleeting accepting feeling her misgivings were doubled. Until there was conclusive proof, that she wouldn’t immediately be tossed into Herbert’s clutches, first impressions meant nothing.

          “Her articles’ve gotten more funny lately,” Chrissy said, and there was that odd half-heard lilt to her voice. Ace sighed inwardly.

          “She’s in her office right now if you want to talk to her again,” Ace said with a fake grin that squinted up her eyes. “Follow me.”

 

Chrissy followed Ace up the stairs and neither of them spoke, the quiet a tangible shroud around them torn only by the steps’ creaking beneath their feet. When the door had shut behind them, Chrissy cleared her throat.

          “So, Ace, either I’m better at disguisin’ than I thought or you’re more dense than you seem.”

Ace froze, and all the tension left in an instant. She stopped halfway up the steps and turned around.

 ‘Chrissy’ had changed her look a bit, now, trading purple for brown and her coat for a striped shirt and beige jacket. Her hair stayed in the braid. Freckles speckled her face. She grinned.

          “I’d guess the former, I’ve been taught by the best.” Paige made no attempt to hide her accent now, as the two finished climbing the stairs. Ace held the door to the office open, gesturing for Paige to sit in the chair that had used to be hers. Ace ensconced herself in Aunt Arctic’s old chair, swiveling back and forth slightly as she folded her flippers in front of her. Paige raised her brow.

          “You trying to look official or….?” She remarked at Ace’s pensive stare. Ace shook her head.

          “No, no, just thinking,” she said with a dismissive wave of her flipper.

Leave it to Herbert to leave an agent out of his equations. Relief and curiosity warred in Ace’s head. She took a deep, audible breath. “It’s…nice to see you, Paige.”

          “I can say the same to you. Thought I’d lose you, when you showed up in the snow like that.”

Ace chuckled emptily.

          “Made quite the entrance, didn’t I?”

Paige rolled her eyes.

          “Scared me half to death is what you did.” She paused, gaze shifting slightly in thought, and leaned forward. “That’s not why I’m here, though. Aunt Arctic told you already, I assume?”

Ace confirmed with a nod. Paige returned the gesture. She held out a flipper.

          “We can talk more at my place. Guess there’s no point in walking, you’ve teleported before.”

Ace took Paige’s flipper, and Paige dug her EPF tablet out of her pocket. As she was about to press the button, Ace made a small nondescript noise as something occurred to her.

          “Herbert knows the EPF,” she said. “Use mine.” She handed Paige her PSA phone. She took it gladly and fiddled it for a bit, turning the little wheel with a _click, click, click_.

Ace took her flipper again, the button made a small _tck_ as it was pressed, and they were in non-space.

 

Quiet, quiet non-space. It was free now of pain but no less unnatural for those few and many quantum moments that existed outside of time as her matter tried to find the space it was meant to inhabit.

 

Paige’s igloo emerged before her eyes, and she stumbled forward slightly. She caught her breath.  
The first word that came to mind was _cozy_ , which was odd when Ace considered the circumstances. A fire roared and crackled in a hand-sculpted icy fireplace; the rest of the igloo, equally handmade and equally sturdy, sparkled with all its tiny snow inclusions. What little space the small dwelling afforded was taken up by PH’s sparse belongings: a bag, packed and ready to flee; a pillow and blanket, laid directly on the ground; a plain metal pot, sunk in the snow by the fireplace.  
There was, as well, the belongings of another. Another blanket, next to Paige’s. Another bag, ready to run. Ace turned to Page.

          “…Dot?”

Paige shut her eyes for a long second.

          “…Captured, for all we know. It’s been a week or two now.”

Ace nodded gravely. She hesitated before her next sentence.

          “…And the rest?”

Paige looked away, inhaling audibly, and that told the whole story.

          “Even the puffles,” she said.

 

Ace took a seat beside the fireplace. She watched as the flame flickered and danced among the ash and embers, unaware that it was surrounded by its own antithesis. She sat like this for a long while, hardly acknowledging Paige sitting beside her.  
She wondered if they’d gone gently. The shattered beakers and fragmented spectacles had told the tale of Gary’s struggle, but the others…

The only one she could picture going without a fight was Aunt Arctic, accepting as she’d been of her fate.

          “So,” Paige said, cutting through Ace’s thoughts. Ace blinked. “Aunt Arctic’s gone—so she did it then? Passed on her role to you?”

Ace nodded, a lump rising in her throat.

          “I guess she had no other choice,” she whispered. “I’m not the first candidate for Director, certainly. I denounced the EPF to her face, and yet…” She trailed off with a little laugh.

          “…And yet here you are.”

Ace said nothing. The fire crackled and popped, and leapt up, hungry as was its nature. After a bit she spoke softly.

 

          “And yet here I am.”


	4. Fond Memories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter! More of an in-between.

          “I’ll keep watch through the night,” Ace said. “You go sleep, I’ll sit by the fireplace.” The idea of sleep was so, so tantalizing as exhaustion weighed down on her, but with it came the thought of dozens of crab claws quietly stealing her away.

Paige nodded.

          “Good plan,” she said with a yawn. “Thanks.”

          “It’s not a problem. I probably couldn’t sleep if I tried.” Ace shrugged. “Besides, someone has to watch out.”

Paige folded back the edge of her blankets. The blanket and pillow beside her remained untouched, Dot’s absence made tangible. She patted the EPF tablet in her pocket.

          “Where’ll we meet if we’re found out?”

Ace thought for a moment, about how far Herbert’s reach might have stretched over this past month, or even further back—casting his net over the island so quietly even the EPF couldn’t see.

          “We’ll meet in the wilderness. There’s a cave, Herbert used it as a lair once but I don’t think he remembers it.”

Paige nodded pensively. She cracked a small smile.

          “Was that the cave you got lost in?” she said. Ace rolled her eyes with a chuckle; she couldn’t help but smile at the memory.  
That had been, what, her first year as an agent?  
And already Gary, bless his heart, had been using her as a guinea pig. Not that she bore him any ill will for it. She couldn’t put a flipper on why she held such fond recollection of this particular instance, when by all means it should have been— _had_ been—terrifying. Crashing down a nearly sheer cliff and needing to fend for herself with nothing but a broken sled: nothing a more experienced agent couldn’t handle, but she’d been so young and had so much to learn.  
It was the puffle, she realized, which had turned it around. She wondered where it was now. The little puffball had soothed all her worries, it seemed in retrospect. She remembered with a little smile how it had leaned against her and purred as she waited for her fish to cook and tried to quell her fear. Fear which had, of course, lasted but a night before her rescue.

Oh, to be the one awaiting rescue. Oh, to be able to lean on _someone_.

          “How rumors fly. I didn’t get lost _in_ the cave, more just,” she gestured with her flippers, “the general area, but yeah. Blame Gary for that, I guess.” She chuckled.

          “What was it he’d asked you to test? A sled?”

          “That’s the sled _3000,_ to you.” Ace paused. “You should get to sleep.”

Paige laughed for a brief fleeting moment. She yawned.

          “Right you are, Ace.”

 

Without another word Paige turned over and at least feigned rest, breathing deeply and evenly. Ace sighed.

She leaned against the icy wall made slick by the warmth of the fireplace. The flame crackled, a soothing sound.

When she was sure that Paige was really asleep, she took the remains of her EPF tablet out of her pocket. It was nearly unrecognizable; a sooty dust had settled at the bottom of the bag, obscuring its contents.

She dumped the pieces unceremoniously on the ground. They skidded on the ice; she nudged them around to get a good look at them.  
It was obviously unfixable. You can’t fix a tablet that’s been broken into so many shattered chunks. If she pushed them together a certain way she could see where the desk shard had struck; the most twisted and bent edges were on either side of a schism through the center of the tablet. Nigh-microscopic wires stuck out, singed at the edges; bits of circuitboard showed green through the blackened, melted edges.  
How hot had the desk shard been?  
Had that heat saved her life? Stopped the bleeding enough for her to survive the teleport?  
If it hadn’t, if she’d died there in non-space, would she have emerged? Or would she have remained just…nowhere?  
She tried to put some of the smaller pieces in their places, mostly just to see if they could. Many of them had doubled back on themselves or were too shattered to discern in the first place. The task was impossible, for how does one complete a puzzle where half the pieces are missing and the other half don’t fit together quite right?

There was one intact piece of the tablet.  
The button which would have brought her back to HQ lay lonely on the floor in a skiff of dust. She picked it up and brushed it off. A single chip off the edge was all that marred it; still recognizable, the rough silhouette of the EPF emblem gleamed in the firelight. The emblem which Ace had so readily eschewed—and yet, the emblem under which her closest friends fought.  
The friends she had left behind.  
The friends who she would not abandon again.

 

Paige awoke with a yawn and a stretch, blinking sleepily. Ace yawned in kind.

          “A’ight,” Paige said. “My turn to keep watch. You have to be exhausted.”

          “You’d be surprised,” Ace said. A few quick blinks and another yawn betrayed her lie. Paige raised her eyebrows incredulously.

          “Mmm hmm.” Her gaze flicked to the shattered tablet. “What’s that—oh, your tablet?” She nudged at a piece of it with her flipper. “It’s in worse shape than you were,” she remarked half-humorously. “Your PSA phone will do for teleportation?”  
          “Yes,” Ace reassured her. Ace yawned a third time, and waddled toward where Paige had been sleeping. She lay down and pulled the blanket over herself.  
Even the thin pillow on a hard ice floor was the most comfortable thing in the world.  
Before she could sleep, she cleared her throat to get Paige’s attention.  
          “Hmm?”

          “Wake me up at…” She interrupted herself with another yawn. What time _was_ it? “…a reasonable time. We need to discuss where to go from here, what our game plan is.”

          “Quick on the uptake, eh, Director?”

          “I have to be.” Ace took a deep breath. “We have to find out where the others are—if they’re even alive. If they are, every second puts them in more danger. We need to find a way to get them _back._ ”


	5. Layers of Ash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Farewell to Club Penguin Rewritten, whose simultaneous existence of the EPF and PSA is a main plot point of this AU. Made it fun to figure out the layout of HQ XD

          “Ace, we can’t!” Paige shouted, slamming her clenched flipper on the table. “The HQ is the first place Herbert’ll look for us now that the fires have gone out!”

The two of them sat in Paige’s tiny, tiny kitchen. It was more of just a collection of mini appliances, whatever would fit in the tiny makeshift igloo—a countertop stove burner, a coffee machine, a minifridge. A pot of hot cocoa bubbled on the stovetop.

          “I know, I know,” Ace conceded with a wave of her flipper, brow furrowed in thought. “Where else are we supposed to start, though? We have no leads, our network is completely severed, there’s no one we can trust but each other right now.” She shivered, and held her cocoa mug close to her, savoring what little warmth it provided.  
Snow had nearly piled up to the igloo’s roof. They needn’t worry about the door much—teleportation fixed that issue—but the windows were another story. They were difficult to clear from the inside, and the igloo still smelled of smoke. Ace tried to push back the thought of how long they could last in an enclosed space, with a fire, or how quickly they would freeze without one.  
That didn’t matter when the world itself was freezing over, and all the snowdrifts did was remind them of their constantly ticking clock. The only light to be seen was the lights that shone from Herbert’s lair, sticking out sorely from the wilderness, and the occasional dim glow of an igloo.  
Ace took a sip of her cocoa and sighed. The chocolate was warming, but even the best of foods tasted bland with lives hanging over her head.

          “I’ll take your point,” Paige said. “We’re really between a rock and a hard place, aren’t we?”

          “That we are.”

          “So,” Paige continued, folding her flippers in front of her and leaning forward. “Assuming we do go to HQ. The place burned down, Ace, do you really expect we’ll find anything?”

          “Gary’s too smart to leave his files where fire could touch them, considering the…fate…” Ace gestured in an explosive manner, “of most of his inventions. Even if most of the lower-clearance files are destroyed, the Gadget Room might contain at least a lead.”

          “Gadget room…” Paige mused, and then she began to chuckle, which soon raised to a full laugh as she leaned back in her chair. “Crikey! I’d forgotten about that. Shows how long I’ve been away from the old HQ.” She thought for a moment, eyes darting as she did, and her face lit up. “I’ll bet Herbert forgot about it too.”

          “Exactly!” Ace exclaimed with a grin. “We just need to get in and out undetected. The moment we lose the element of surprise we lose the gadget room _and_ put ourselves in danger.”

Paige shrugged.

          “We’re secret agents, Ace,” she said. “Sneaking in and out is what we do best.”

Ace nodded.

          “Do you have a map?” she asked. “I lost mine back in the explosion.”

Paige seemed bemused at this, even as she drew a map from her shirt pocket and slid it across the table. Ace took it gladly and unfolded it.

          “I’d think you know where our own HQ is?” she said. Ace waved away her questioning.

          “I just want to quantify our plan, I do better when I write things down.”

          “Fair enough,” Paige said, and leaned over the table to see what Ace was doing.

Ace took a pen from the little pencil holder in the table’s center—a coffee can wrapped in a cute multicolored ribbon, with Dot’s style written all over it--and began to draw. In the empty white snowy space between the town and the edge of the island she drew a rough floor plan of the PSA HQ, jotting down entrances, vents, et cetera. With a softly hissing breath she recalled where the wall had been busted during the explosion, and where the desk had gone flying into the opposite corner. She clicked the pen shut and grabbed another color from the can.

          “Alright, the main entrance is busted completely—all of the valves are severed, it was that damn desk,” a pause to breathe and recollect her thoughts, “And I think it would be advantageous _not_ to try and teleport in.”

          “Who knows what waits for us in there?” Paige agreed. “Be ready and all that.”

          “Exactly. You probably know the Command Room better than I do—I think that’s our best way in.”

Paige held out a flipper to silently ask for the pen; Ace obliged. Paige turned the map to face herself. 

          “Herbert knows the doors here, here, and here,” she said, marking each with a big ‘X’. “But what he doesn’t know…”

 

 

Ace had always hated the prospect of crawling through an air duct, and thanked her lucky stars that this one was merely a matter of getting into an elevator shaft. The duct creaked as she crawled forward, feet awkwardly scrabbling to try and get a purchase on the slippery metal. She sucked in a breath.

Paige dropped into the elevator shaft, and Ace could see the opening in front of her. Wires running down the walls, cables stretching every which way, this was what lay behind the slick elevators (amazing how much effort had been put into appearances) which had whisked them to HQ whenever the whim took them to arrive via phoning facility. Paige stood on what Ace assumed was the top of an elevator. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small crowbar; this she used to pry open a small metal plate beneath her. Every metallic squeaking was followed by a moment of stillness as both stood tensed, flippers on their phones, and waited for the familiar _click-clack click-clack_.  
The crabs never came, and when the hatch was open they both dropped through. It was certainly a tight squeeze. Ace’s sleeve caught on a screw; she tugged, and it came loose with a soft _rrrip._ The elevator had escaped the incident nearly unharmed, and Ace’s breath hitched at the familiarity of the pristine metal walls and the buttons with their glowing green LEDs.  
If she focused perhaps she could pretend that what lay beyond was just as intact. But now was not the time to pretend.

She pressed the ‘open’ button, and the door obliged—running under its own power source had been one of these elevators’ main claims to fame—sliding open with very little resistance, accompanied by the _whoosh_ that should have led to a hubbub of activity: penguins darting back and forth with papers and gadgets tucked under their flippers, the babble of agents planning at the central table, the soft humming of others beaming in and out.  
Now it led to silence and the acrid smell of leftover smoke which stung in her eyes; she blinked rapidly as she beheld the Command Room.

Utterly destroyed. Moreso than even the PSA HQ, the laser and subsequent explosions had ravaged the space, leaving scorchmarks and twisted walls wherever Ace looked. Chunks of pavement hung from the ceiling, barely supported by sparking wires. The central table was intact, but most of the chairs had been knocked over and everything had accumulated an inches-thick layer of ash and dust: the same which billowed through the air and bade her cough hoarsely. Above it the big screen still blinked on at their entrance. The emblem flickered at its center as if waiting for their arrival, though a corner was obscured by the glitches and burnt-out bulbs that crept across the screen. Ace heard Paige exhale audibly behind her.

          “I had no idea it was this bad,” Paige whispered, half-awed and half-horrified.

          “I did,” Ace deadpanned. She stepped down from the elevator onto the ashy floor, leaving footprints which shifted the gray flakes and made some flutter into the air like fallen leaves. “Let’s go.”

They made their way through the Command Room without speaking, their footsteps muffled by the ash and the snow that was still drifting through the hole that the laser had blown through the ceiling.    
Ace approached the tube which once led to the Virtual Reality room, and below that the PSA HQ. Or at least where the tube was—now only its base remained, metal curled away from the blast, shattered bits of glass all that remained of the transport. Green wires glowed beyond it, now leading nowhere and doing nothing, though they’d once held virtual worlds within them. Ace leaned over the edge to see what awaited below.

The broken stone of the ceiling. A slight glimpse of burnt pavement and a shattered tv screen. The PSA HQ.

Ace took a deep breath. She coughed.

          “Rope’s secured,” Paige said. Ace turned, and nodded. Paige tossed the other end of the rope down the hole in the floor, making sure that it wasn’t in a place where the jagged base wouldn’t tear it. Ace went first, bracing herself against the wall as she climbed down, slowly, holding onto the rope as she did. Paige followed close behind.

The HQ was still, quiet, yet to Ace there were still vivid echoes of the cacophony of fire and agony that had accompanied her last exit from it. She followed with her gaze the path which she imagined the destruction must have taken in that millisecond: the scorchmarks on the ground, the shattered array of televisions, the desk half-flung into the opposite wall. Paige waddled across the room, tentatively, to a spot that seemed nearly untouched save for a shard of metal streaked with dark dull red, stuck into the base of the wall.

          “Is that where—“ she whispered, turning toward Ace. Ace just stared at the shard, took a few steps toward it. Paige sighed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

          “Yes. Yeah. It is,” she said, only halfway paying attention to her words. She shook her head to clear her thoughts. “We should go.”

The gadget room door was on the other wall. Part of it was bent inward, a conveniently penguin-sized opening formed by the warping, and the mechanisms were sparking as they detected the gap between and tried to close a door which was already closed.

Ace lifted herself through the opening and found herself in, aside from the requisite layer of dust, what may as well have been the past. Nothing was changed. Nothing was missing. The gadgets still sat on their shelves, the sled—oh, the _sled_ —was still there beneath them, polished and put back together and preserved as a prototype, record of Gary’s mistakes, a way to ensure that he would not make them again.  
The Thingamajig 3000-whatever was still there, the sign indicating its current number knocked down by the blast. Ace wondered if it would still work. She was briefly inclined to try and start it up—but no, that would make too much noise.  
She wished, though.

File cabinets were stacked beneath a desk covered in papers. Ace made to rush toward them, but paused.

There were pawprints on the floor. They weren’t recent—they were sooty and covered with just as much dust as everything else. Barely visible.

          “Paige—“ Ace said.

          “He was here,” Paige confirmed.

The pawprints led to the desk, where one of the file cabinets’ drawers was ajar. It was dented by what seemed to be a massive paw, wrenching open the drawer in anger and leaving it once Herbert had taken all he needed.

Ace approached the drawer and tugged it open with a long screeching sound that grated and seemed louder than it probably was. The files were multicolored, each with a manila envelope inside. Each color had ten files exactly. Good old Gary, such a focus on evenness.  
This meant that none of the files were _missing._ Was this a red herring?

Ace pulled an envelope from one of the files. In it were blueprints, pages and pages of them: Ace looked more closely and saw that they were for a prototype of a…hover-vehicle? Of some kind? Of course after jetpacks hover vehicles were the next step, but they’d always seemed to be an artifact of the future. Leave it to Gary to bring the future to the present. Who would he get to test these? Ace smiled a bit as she flipped through the hoverboard blueprints. Page 1, page 2, page 3…and page 1 again. A copy? A backup?

There were only two copies in the folder: the original, and what Ace presumed was a backup. What a backup was doing in the same location as the original, Ace couldn’t know. She beckoned to Paige.

          “Help me look through these. We might just need to find the ones that have only one copy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had "Crikey" written as "[Australian exclaimation]" for most of writing this chapter


	6. Gary the Gun-get Guy

 

          “Hey, Ace!” Paige held up a few sheets of paper. “Found one,” she said. She tossed the folder to Ace, who caught it and flipped it open. Ace scrunched her face in thought as she scanned the blueprints. She understood maybe half of Gary’s notes—in that way that you only understand half of a second language, where if hard pressed to translate it you couldn’t, but in context you can get the vague idea of what it’s trying to say.

          “Cryostorage?” she asked, half to Paige and half to herself. Even as she spoke she connected the dots—they filled her with dread but they connected all the same. The equations, the notes, the diagrams jumped out at her: the clear images of a tank and a gun, meant to freeze the target and keep them frozen.

She realized, as relief met the dread and she exhaled a breath that she didn’t know she had been holding, the idea of the EPF’s mere capture had never been a surety. She had believed it to be, but the idea of the alternative—the much worse, much more immutable alternative—was so unbearable, that belief had been a mere effort to keep from thinking about it.

          “….so they’re frozen.” Paige continued Ace’s line of thought effortlessly. Ace nodded.

          “Frozen….but they’re alive,” she said.

Paige’s beak broke into a grin and she shut her eyes to blink away a few relieved tears which had sprung to them. “Dot’s alive,” she whispered. She inhaled and blinked, and shook her head. Her expression fell slightly. “...we think.”

          “It’s the thought that counts,” Ace said with a smile that she hoped didn’t betray that she was thinking the same thing. They’d made an assumption. But…it wasn’t the worst of assumptions. “Let’s keep looking.”

Paige nodded.

 

The task was mindless enough. Counting became simpler and simpler the more you did it, the soft sound of rustling papers became a monotony, and it left room for Ace to think. She wasn’t lost in her thoughts per se, but she still found herself straying, following the winding path of her own thought process to its conclusions. Assuming the cryostorage wasn’t an uncharacteristically brilliant red herring. Herbert’s plans had always been blunt: Blow up HQ with popcorn. Try to blow up HQ with a hydra robot. Blow up HQ with fire. He wasn’t necessarily known for his subtlety.  
And yet he’d managed to build an entire device under their noses. She wasn’t sure whether that was an indicator of his intelligence or of their own shortcomings.  
It didn’t matter. She assumed for the sake of her own psyche that her assumptions about the team’s capture were correct. She clenched her flipper around the folder she was holding until it wrinkled slightly. She took a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale.   
They’re alive, she told herself. Alive. She tried to channel some of the sheer joy that had radiated from Paige’s face when she had come to that conclusion. But Paige’s mind had gone immediately to Dot. Of course it had.   
Ace wasn’t sure she was that close to any of them.

She wondered how it felt, to be frozen. Was it only the body? She shut her eyes for a moment and tried to imagine it for a moment. She couldn’t. The chill of the air and the ambient sounds were too much to block out even for a hypothetical.

…Was it the mind? Would they wake up as if they’d only just been captured?

 

She jolted herself out of her thoughts when she came across another folder with only one blueprint copy.

          “Paige,” she beckoned. Paige looked over her shoulder at the blueprints.

Ace’s heart sank. It was obvious from first glance that this was Herbert’s device.

Well, sort of. All the diagrams pointed to something smaller. Something handheld. Powered by a small solar panel at the back, with discs decreasing in size to focus the beam. With a trigger ready to pull.  
Herbert had merely taken the design and blown it up to a world-changing size.

          “…why the _hell_ would Gary design a gun?” Paige asked, her voice quavering.

          “You think I would have an answer to anything Gary does?” Ace found herself snapping more than she intended, and Paige frowned. “…Sorry. I don’t know.” She waved the folder in the air with that little _fwibwibwibwibwibwibwib_ sound that laminated papers make when you wiggle them back and forth. She tried to keep herself calm, though she herself was shaking slightly. She felt echoes of pain stab through her side, could almost _hear_ the crackling of flames. Flames whose source had been designed not by the villain who claimed them but by one whom she had _trusted._  

          “Damnit,” Ace muttered, as her flipper flew reflexively to her side. Paige looked at her, about to say something worried, but she waved her away. “It’s fine. I mean, I’m fine. The gun isn’t. Why…the island was peaceful, wasn’t it?”

          “There was Herbert,” Paige reminded her.

          “The worst that Herbert ever did before he got his hands on _this--”_ Ace waved the folder back and forth again, “--was hijack a hydra, Paige. And last time I checked, the hydra was Gary’s too.”

Paige conceded her point. Ace handed her the laser blueprints and she tucked them into the folder with the ones for the cryostorage.

 

Those were the only two blueprints which had been taken. Ace brushed ash off her clothes as she stood. Some got in her throat; she coughed.

          “Think it’s safe to teleport?” Paige asked, obviously hoping that Ace would say yes. It was a long walk here; it would be a longer walk back as they tried to stay undetected.

          “Yes, actually,” Ace said. “Probably safer than walking.” Plus, she was tired as well. Their destination wasn’t anywhere Herbert knew, anyway.

Paige took her flipper and handed her the folder of blueprints. She took out her tablet and punched in the coordinates to her igloo. She scanned the numbers one more time to make sure they were correct, and turned to Ace.

          “Ready?” she asked. Ace nodded.

Paige pressed the button, and they flew through non-space before Ace could blink.

Back at the igloo, Ace relaxed just a bit. She couldn’t help it; this igloo, to her, meant safety. It was irrational, she knew, to put so much trust in a place. Trust was meant for people; what was a place if it weren’t for the people acting on it?

But she was starting to run out of trust for people, she thought, as the folder almost seemed to burn in her flipper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah i said people at the end it had a better ring to it than penguins tbh


End file.
